Philosophically, this looks like breaking the training data limit in the same way that humans do: by using an internally consistent view of the world to imagine new scenarios and integrate them into an updated worldview.
Considering climate was generally defined as a 30 year window when I took earth sciences classes in the early 2000s I don’t think it’s a sleight of hand. Pretending that every minor outlier year in the span of 200 out of tens of thousands of years is an Armageddon-signalling catastrophe in order to secure more funding is far less genuine.
Engineering an improved rubisco into the food supply (or the notional biological carbon capture stream) would significantly boost to the carrying capacity of our planet.
That's impossible. We'd have to reduce to about half of where we are now just for the fauna to stabilize. We've just taken too much too quickly. In the oceans for example there's population collapse of entire genera in different locations every single year and entire dexoygenated dead areas in the photic zone because of overfishing and damage caused by commercial fleets. According to the IUCN Red List there have been at least ten extinctions every year for the past thirty years. It doesn't help that there's a rivalry going on between which country can post the highest numbers for a mostly meaningless metric in GDP, causing deforestation for livestock, overfishing for export, monocultures spreading dozens of miles for crops that have a fifty percent chance of being burned to preserve prices, and so much mining entire mountain ranges disappear.
> We'd have to reduce to about half of where we are now just for the fauna to stabilize
I mean the article states the tobacco photosyntesized twice as effectively, with RsRubisco, which is actually less efficient the GmRubisco. So food-wise it seems hypothetically achievable.
I agree we'd need massive conscious degrowth in every other part of the economy though.
This goes back to my theory that the people most freaked out about climate change are the ones with kids, who are mad that other less responsible people have more kids, while I'm just chilling here with no kids at all and clearly see that if all those assholes stopped having kids, climate change would be solved within 20 years.
Go Vegan! It’s easier than you think, especially since you live in a city. No judgements from me if you can’t/choose not to, it does take work. Just a bit of encouragement, and a thank you for making the compassionate and ecologically sound choice.
UN projections, which are on the "business as usual" side of things.
Plenty of events, like the pandemic, which put immense downward pressure on fertility.
Also, the African continent is a net food importer. This could be turned around - particularly by Nigeria, which has the natural resources to produce fertiliser, but so far the observed effect has been a surge (+65%) of imports.
With the situation in Ukraine being what it is, I don't think this is sustainable.
Niger is currently experiencing a population explosion, which will force it to implement the same policies as Kenya to prevent a Malthusian catastrophe.
I fear that a 'decent world war' nowadays may include nukes, so damage to the environment will be great.
As an example, the dam that was destroyed in Ukraine and flooded a 'small area' (considering the planet-scale)(https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/kakhova-dam-ukraine-russia-1.6...).
Which (your post and my thinking of a response) reminded me of the series: Aftermath - Population Zero (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1264068/); I remember watching some series back in the day.. I think it's time to watch this again.
I'm slowly starting to realise that nukes are very unlikely to be involved simply because the selfish shits who start and run the wars know they personally won't survive if they start the nuke match.
The trouble is you need a ton of water and fertilizer to support that growth, and drought combined with soil quality degradation is already a huge problem in a lot of regions, and will only become moreso as the globe warms and, p.s., fertilizer production is heavily dependent on petrochemicals and contributes to CO2 emissions.
It could be a huge development, no doubt, but there are many bottlenecks in agricultural production, so we need to be careful not to oversell this as some kind of panacea.
The claim was this technology would increase carrying capacity. That implies growing more food, not growing the same amount of food on less land.
I agree, as far as being able to use less land for agriculture, this could be a beneficial development. Only problem is that's not how humans typically work.
There is no chance that we will remain below 1.5C. Because there is (rightly) moral value attached to staying below 1.5, that fact is (also) hard to accept.
The formalized narrative makes sense through a values-based lens, as does the conversation moving through stages of grief as geophysics makes itself felt.
